


Take EXO To School Day

by ellieq_e



Series: Exo Back Next Door [5]
Category: EXO (Band), 우리 옆집에 EXO 가 산다 | EXO Next Door
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 09:10:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20444669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieq_e/pseuds/ellieq_e
Summary: In the midst of Ji Yeon-Hee's unresolved tension with childhood crush Chanyeol, she's called to fulfill her promise of bringing the Exo boys to school with her. But just how does one sneak the country's largest musical sensation into a university full of their adoring fans?





	1. Morning

**Author's Note:**

> Also known as EXO Back Next Door: Episode 5. Part of a series!

“Hey, sleepyhead, rise and shine, rise and shine,” Ji Yeon-hee woke up to the sound of a low, husky voice whispering softly into her ear. She would recognize that voice anywhere: her boy, maybe boyfriend, Park Chanyeol.

“Huh? What time is it?” She asked groggily, reaching up to cuddle his face. When she finally managed to fully open her eyes, she was surprised to see that she was surrounded by not one, or two, but every single one of the apartment’s residents who belonged to the hit boy band Exo, all crowding around her face. She rubbed her eyes vigorously. It wasn’t every day that you woke up to the faces of six supernaturally beautiful boys crowding around you.

“It’s 6:30 in the morning, of course!” sing-songed Baekhyun, making an aegyo expression at her.

“Wha-what?!” she was shaken awake by another arm at her side, Kai’s. “Wha—why?” _What were they becoming, her new mother?_

“Because it’s bring Exo to school day!” they all chorused at her, giving her wide, eager smiles.

_Oh, that_. She dug around her memory, vaguely remembering that she had once made a promise to the former four residents of the place that she would take them with her to her university one day. Of course, back then, they had still been her employer, and using the excuse that it had been winter break, then, she had had no intention of truly following up on it.

Naturally, she should have known that they would remember and come to bug her about it. She looked over at Chanyeol with pleading eyes, momentarily forgetting that they had ended their Saturday on unexplained terms and that he had spent most of Sunday taking care of “the most urgent of business” away from her, but it was clear from his eager, puppy-like expression that he, too, wanted to experience a slice of her “normal” university life, as they liked to call it, and wouldn’t be letting her back out of her off-handed, at-the-time-empty promise any time soon.

“Okay, _fine_,” she sighed, fully awake now and hauling herself out of bed. “But if you’re going to do this right without being caught, you’re going to need disguises.”

…

Half an hour later and more than five closets later, the boys were finally ready to head to school. In the end, D.O. and Suho had opted out, instead deciding to check out a nearby fishing wharf they had always dreamed of seeing, though they still partook in the outfit-picking session to best fit in with the common fisherman. Sehun had disappeared as well, yelling something that sounded vaguely like he was going to see her brother.

_Oh, well. Less trouble for me_. Ji shrugged, sizing up her remaining three followers. Kai and Chanyeol she had dressed up like her school’s janitorial staff, the invisible cleaning crew who would be sure to be inconspicuous as long as they kept their heads down and hats on, and Baekhyun she had dressed in an oversized black hoodie with the hood up and sleeves down. Over their faces, all three wore blue, drugstore facemasks to hide the marble-carved bone structure that had made them famous. “If this works, I should just transfer to the costume department,” Ji muttered underneath her breath.

“What?” Chanyeol leaned over to hear what she was saying.

“It’s nothing,” she replied, shaking her head. The three boys looked at each other and shrugged.

“Ok, here goes,” Ji said, turning to open the door. And with that, the three world famous pop stars stepped out onto the little street in ** with their university student “Incheon Gal” as a guide and headed to the nearest bus stop.

…  
“Ow, ow, ow-ow-ow-ow-ow,” Kai complained as soon as they got off the city bus. “Why did you have to jam your elbows into my stomach like that?” he accused Baekhuyn sorely.

“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun said, putting his hands up in defense. “I had nowhere else to put them.”

“I forgot how…_squished_ public transport can be,” Chanyeol said, rubbing his neck. At his giraffe height, he had had to stoop so that he wouldn’t bump his head on the other passengers’ overhead belongings.

Walking in line with Ji at the moment, he instinctively put a hand on her back to guide her through the nonexistent dangers of the now-empty streets.

Behind them, Baekhyun and Kai were arguing again.

“And why do you get to be a student, anyway?” Kai asked, gesturing at his own plain-looking janitorial outfit.

“Ji probably thinks I’m cuter,” retorted Baekhyun, sticking his tongue out/making a mocking cute face at his hyung.

“Hey! Will you two stop it back there!” Ji finally hissed, slowing down so that the two arguing kpop stars almost ran into her.

“Baekyun gets to be my visiting cousin because he’s the shortest of you three—”

“Only by an inch,” muttered Kai under his breath.

“And it would be weird if I suddenly had three visiting cousins on the same day, don’t you think?” Ji continued, asking pointedly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kai mumbled in response.

“Ok, we’re getting close now,” she told them as they approached the doors.

“Chan, you should walk with Kai so that it doesn’t look like I’m getting along too closely with our school’s new janitors,” she said, to which Chanyeol’s face fell without her noticing. Dropping his hand from her waist, he obliged silently.

“Ok, everyone, here we go!” she whispered nervously.


	2. Afternoon

Most of Ji’s morning classes passed without incident, and aside from a few bizarre stares, she had been able to mostly explain away the fact that she had three young men following her on the justification that her cousin just happened to be visiting from out of town on the very same day she had been set to give a tour of the school to the school’s newest potential janitorial hires. Even her over actively blushing cheeks were able to somewhat behave and not entirely give her away.

By the time lunch rolled around, Ji was getting giddy. For the first time all day, she got the triumphant feeling that this might actually work. She was almost skipping when she left her 12:30 communications lecture.

That was, until….

“Hold it! You there! Miss Ji, is it?”

Ji Yeon-hee and the three young men beside her stopped in their tracks as the deep, gruff voice of her middle-aged communications professor called for her to stop. With a pained expression on her face, she, along with the boys, slowly pivoted in their place as if they had just been caught sneaking away from the scene of a petty crime. Fearing the worst, Ji held her breath._ This is it. It’s all crashing down now. I almost got away with sneaking the biggest pop sensations on the planet into my local university, and my downfall is this communications-teaching middle-aged man?!_ She could hardly believe it herself.

“Ji—” _Here it comes_. Ji squinted her eyes shut in anticipation.

“I think that it’s a very lovely thing you’re doing giving these men an up-close tour of our university,” her professor said, smiling.

Ji unfroze. “You do?” she asked tentatively, unsure whether this was a trap.

“Absolutely,” he replied. Reaching over to shake Kai and Chanyeol’s hands, he smiled widely at them. “It’s nice to meet the fine young men contributing to the upkeep of our wonderful academic institution.”

Chan and Kai nodded mutely to this, just as bewildered as she was and trying to keep their eyes and ears hidden beneath the fringe of their hair. Sadly, both of their new haircuts couldn’t quite afford them this luxury.

“So, are you taking these jobs to put yourselves through school?” the professor continued, jumping to the most reasonable conclusion in his mind.

Looking at each other, Kai and Chan shook their heads.

“Well, here’s my card if you’re ever interested in thinking about a career in communications,” he offered them.

“With faces like yours,” he said, trying to peer around their face masks, to which they uncomfortably squirmed, “you could be on TV in no time.”

So _that’s_ why he had approached them. Whistling merrily, he strolled away, no doubt expecting them to call him within the next few days, two new faces he could once again sell to his shady connections at wannabe-hotshot television stations.

When he was out of earshot, they all breathed a sigh of relief. Phew! Slightly rattled but more triumphant than ever at having survived that encounter, the winsome quartet headed for the cafeteria, their stomachs growling.  
…  
“Hey, Ji Yeon-hee,” Chanyeol whispered to his left, trying to get Ji’s attention above the racket of the large, university cafeteria. Somewhere between her waking up this morning and her arriving at class, she seemed to have remembered that she was somewhat mad at him for having just stranded her for Meena like that on Saturday, and had since been shaking off his affections with a reluctant but forceful shun.

“Hey, Yeon-hee…” Chanyeol tried again, tugging at her arm as she tried to eat her peas. As imagined, this did not go well. He stopped as he watched a dozen little peas roll to the ground and disappear into the midst of stomping feet and grimy dirt.

“What?!” she finally looked at him irritably, a confused expression on her face as if she wasn’t sure whether she should be sad, mad, betrayed, or all three at the same time, and yet at the same time not wanting to be any of those things. Her face had flushed a deep, dark red in distress, and his heart leaped at having been the one to do this to her.

Clearing his throat, he finally took his chance, trying to communicate all the earnestness he felt through the wideness of his snow-globe –sized eyes. “We never got a chance to talk about Saturday,” he said to her, turning so that his body was directly facing his.

Now that she had finally given him the time of day, he planned to make the best of it. Pulling down the light blue facemask that obscured his mouth so she could hear him better, he began his plea.

“Yeon-hee—”

Suddenly, a shriek went up in the cafeteria as someone caught sight of his face.

“EEEeeeeee!!!!! It’s Park Chanyeol from Exo!” An observant fangirl two tables down from them was the first to notice. She was soon followed by many others as everybody in the cafeteria craned their necks to get a glance at their table.

Chanyeol shrunk in his seat a little. This was not how he had planned on this going.

“Eep,” Ji said, her face becoming the outside of a turnip.

With no time to think, Chanyeol did the only thing he could think of doing at times like these.

Grabbing the hand of the furiously blushing and paralyzed girl beside him, he sprang up, got out of his seat, and ran for the doors.

…  
Huh-huh-huh-huh. Chanyeol and Ji panted breathlessly as they dove into the janitor’s closet outside the science wing, the first open door they had seen when they’d exited the cafeteria doors. Ji giggled in spite of herself, pointing to Chanyeol’s janitor’s outfit that she had made him wear that morning.

“How fitting,” Chanyeol chuckled back, letting out a relieved smile at seeing Ji’s hurt at him seem to fade.

After collecting themselves, he adjusted himself into a sitting position with his knees scrunched up in front of him and his back against the wall, her doing the same on the wall opposite to him.

“You, know, we never did get to talk about what happened on Saturday,” he began tentatively, afraid that anything he said would make her start ignoring him again, or worse, break down into tears.

To his surprise, she looked back at him with wide eyes and only the slightest vestiges of red from the cafeteria present on her cheeks.

“Ok, tell me, then,” she said, her eyes wide, unblinking, and open. The eyes of his Jin Yeon-hee. From those eyes, he understood that she would hear him out, that she even wanted to believe him oh-so-badly, and all he had to do to wipe away the hurt was to tell her what had happened.

_What _had_ happened? Where to begin?_

“How about from when you left the breakfast shop?” she prompted, as if reading his mind.

He nodded, swallowing as he began his tale.

“Ok, from the breakfast shop:

_So, we just left the breakfast shop (You know why, of course), because I was coerced away by this woman who at the time seemed very unfamiliar and strange to me. At first, I just thought she was maybe jus one step higher than your usual paparazzi, after some mind-twist of a scoop._

_I even considered not going, you know. Because I knew it would hurt you so bad. And I would never, ever want to hurt you._"

Chanyeol paused his story to glance over at Ji, who sat quietly looking at her feet. She gestured for him to go on. He nodded.

"_So, she took me to this office in one of those high-rise buildings in the financial district, up to the seventh floor. And there, she whipped off her glasses and—_"

Ji winced next to him, but Chanyeol was quick to shake his hands worriedly.

“Wait, no, it’s not what you think.”

_She whipped off her glasses and smirked at me knowingly, and in that moment I remembered who she was. Youngest daughter of the wealthy Pahng family and heir to their multi-million dollar tabloid _Kpop Today!_ gossip magazine._

“Also, one of my former classmates who used to like me back in grade school,” he added quickly. “But she knows I never liked her like that. And never will,” he added for good measure.

_Anyway, so I spent hours in her office trying to work out a deal with her, how to get her to not publish that photo of us sitting in the breakfast with both the news that Exo’s Park Chanyeol was dating his childhood sweetheart and the news that he had moved back to his childhood home in the ** district._

“So what’d you do?” Ji asked in spite of herself, looking up shyly.

“I—I made a deal with her,” Chanyeol replied, hanging his head in shame. “I stayed out all night with my management trying to find a way around it, but even their top lawyers weren’t able to find a legal way out of it.” His voice petered off at that, so Ji scooted closer.

“What deal did you make?” she asked him softly, preparing herself for the worst. Had he tipped her 20 million wons? 40 million? Had he sold his house and his soul and his band mates and her? (Ji couldn’t help letting her mind wander to the worst possible case scenarios as she thought of what that woman could have made Chanyeol do in order to keep about the fact that he had returned to his childhood home).

Confused by Chanyeol’s sudden silence, she looked to him, waiting for the answer. But instead of responding, his lips came crashing down on hers and she could no longer think straight.


End file.
